"Wheat grows twice as fast under LEDs"

A team of scientists has cut the growing time of wheat by 50 per cent by using LED lighting. It’s the latest breakthrough in the LED revolution sweeping the horticultural industry. Researchers from Australia and the UK grew wheat from seed to maturity in just eight weeks instead of the standard 16 week growing time for the cereal grown in spring.

by Ray Molony, Lux Magazine

The ‘speed-breeding’ regime developed by teams at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, in conjunction with the universities of Queensland and Sydney, uses a glasshouse with LEDs ‘tuned’ to aid photosynthesis in wheat and illuminated for up to 22 hours a day.

'I'd like to think that in 10 years from now you could walk into a field and point to plants whose attributes and traits were developed using this technology’, says Dr Brande Wulff of the John Innes Centre, pictured, of the LED lighting regime that has dramatically boosted wheat growing times. Pic: John Innes Centre 2017

The development means that, for the first time, it is possible to grow as many as six generations of wheat every year, a threefold increase on the shuttle-breeding techniques currently used by breeders and researchers. The success of the project is being compared to the post-World War Two ‘shuttle-breeding’ innovations in cereal production.

A control experiment using high pressure sodium lights at the University of Queensland, Australia. The scientists say the sodium vapour lamps are ineffective because they generate much heat and emit poor quality light compared to LEDs. Pic: University of Queensland

‘Globally, we face a huge challenge in breeding higher yielding and more resilient crops,’ the leader of the team, Dr Brande Wulff of the John Innes Centre, told Lux. ‘Being able to cycle through more generations in less time, will allow us to more rapidly create and test genetic combinations and find the best combinations for different environments.’

Despite a rapidly growing world population and the impact of climate change, the improvement rates of several staple crops have stalled in recent years.

Speed breeding, says Dr Wulff, offers a potential new solution to a global challenge for the 21st century.

‘People said you may be able to cycle plants fast, but they will look tiny and insignificant, and only set a few seeds. In fact, the new technology creates plants that look better and are healthier than those using standard conditions. One colleague could not believe it when he first saw the results.

‘I’d like to think that in 10 years from now you could walk into a field and point to plants whose attributes and traits were developed using this technology.’

The international team also says it has proof that the speed-breeding technique can be used for a range of important crops. They have achieved up to six generations per year for bread wheat, durum wheat, barley, pea, and chickpea; and four generations for canola, a form of rapeseed. This is a significant increase compared with widely used commercial breeding techniques. No supplementary carbon dioxide was added in any of the experiments.

Speed breeding, when employed alongside conventional field-based techniques, can be an important tool to enable advances in understanding the genetics of crops, say the scientists.

'Speed breeding as a platform can be combined with lots of other technologies such as gene editing to get to the end result faster,’ explains Dr Lee Hickey from the University of Queensland.

The study shows that traits such as plant pathogen interactions, plant shape and structure, and flowering time can be studied in detail and repeated using the technology.

The speed breeding technology has been welcomed by wheat breeders who have become early adopters.

The John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, is an international centre for plant science, research, genetics and microbiology. Pic: Google Maps 2016

Ruth Bryant, a wheat disease expert at UK seed supplier RAGT said: ‘Breeders are always looking for ways to speed up the process of getting a variety to market so we’re really interested in the concept of speed breeding.’ The company is working closely with Dr Wulff’s group at the John Innes Centre to be the first to develop the method in a commercial setting.

Dr Allan Rattey, a wheat crop breeder with Australian company Dow AgroSciences, has used the technology to breed wheat with tolerance to pre-harvest sprouting, a major problem in Australia.

‘Environmental control for effective screening and the long time taken to cycle through several cycles of recurrent selection were major bottlenecks. The speed breeding and targeted selection platform have driven major gains for both of these areas of concerns.’

Speed breeding with LEDs is one of the topics to be covered at two special conferences on the lighting revolution. The first takes place in Utrecht, the Netherlands on 14 and 15 May 2018. See the programme here. The second takes place on 9 and 10 October in Portland, Oregon, USA. See the programme here.

Horticultural Lighting ConferenceEager to learn more about LEDs and lighting? On May 14 -15 the Horticultural Lighting Conference will take place at the Conference Centre at Jaarbeurs, Utrecht, the Netherlands. The aim of the conference is to bring the grower and manufacturer sectors together, and it will feature a fast-paced, informative format designed to share the latest insights, best practices and ideas in this emerging market. Industry’s leading experts show how to harness the potential of horticultural lighting and Sreya Ghosh of the John Innes will talk about speed breeding.